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Me again, F5 question after some reading

M

Mezrein

New member
Ok, been doing some reading on here, going to hopefully get some swinging in this weekend and I wanted to get clarified on my understand of the F5, which is even more complex than I orignally thought. :)

So, for me, I'm hunting for both deep coins, clad, and jewelery
Looking at some posts from Mike, and depending on my soil conditions, which I'm not sure what they are where I'll be hunting, as I've never hunted eastern oregon before, I want my gain around 65 and thres near 0, and I want dual tones.

A couple of his posts mentioned that super deep coins he maxes gain, balances with thres, and does single or dual tone and when jewelery hunting he +5's thres, balances with gain, and goes 4 tone mode.

So as I said, for me Im guessing I should go midrange on gain, go probably 0 or +1 on thres, and go dual mode tone.

Sound about right?
I'm still highly confused how the threshold / gain comb's work, I have a basic understand of what gain is, and a very basic understanding of threshold. My last detector was a bounty hunter tracker 2, it had sens, ground balance and discrim and that was it. It also was dual tone.
And random question, does the goldbug 2's sens / thres have the same basic combo structure? if so I'm glad Im learning about this stuff now, :)
 
Ok, so I got home and decided to do some air tests with it and noticed something. If I put the gain anything past 40 its jumps all over the place, even with thres turned all the way down to -9. Once I am below 40, it stables out. I tried switching out the batteries, and that did not help. Yes it's ground balanced, although I noticed after doing the gb and doing some test swings the ground balance changes from 10 to 90 with every single swing. No power lines near me, fe meter also bounces from nothing showing to max bars. I know the area Im sweeping is clean, because I dug out a 3 foot by 3 foot by 3 foot section, and filled it in with fill dirt that I sifted through before dumping in the hole. Call me crazy, but I would think that I should be able to get my gain up higher than 40, :)
 
Welcome to the F5, Mezrien, and good luck with it. It's a fine machine :thumbup: and yes there is a learning curve.

The first suggestion I"d offer is to use the coil in motion as a reference point for stability as opposed to the coil being stationary. You should be able to set significantly higher stable gain and threshold settings when the coil is moving. Get used to taking your headphones off when making recoveries to keep the stationary coil chatter from driving you crazy. The downside is more wear and tear on your headphones from the repeated on and off. The upside is you stay more aware of your surroundings.

I'd also suggest that you try your F5 in another location and see if you have the same problems. EMI can come from many other sources besides powerlines so a test in only one location could be an EMI issue.

I've had EMI issues at a few locations with my F5. There are multiple ways to mitigate it with the F5. You can turn down the gain and/or threshold. You can switch to a smaller coil if you have one and run hotter. You can also keep your gain/threshold settings higher and turn up the discrimination which will usually get rid of any EMI problems.
 
Hi all, I went out to The Dalles this weekend, and was FINALLY able to get a good 3 hours of swinging in. However, I had a lot of chatter on every pass, making target identification real tricky. I think the reason for this was my FE03 meter was at 3 of 4 bars, I had my gain set at 50, thres 0. Anything higher than that and it would chatter without moving it. I was in a park in the middle of no where to be honest. I could get it to quiet down by dropping my gain to 30 and putting thres at -2, but then I was barely getting 1 inch depth.
 
Hi, do you have a cell phone on? If you touch the wire connector at the box does it cause the unit the sound off? Is there anything on or around you that may cause interference, gps ,cell, ? Mine was a bad connector that caused massive noise!( And it was intermittent)
 
Ill try bumping my cell phone on the wire when I get home. As far as anyone else, I tend to avoid people when detecting, unless they're detecting with me. Closest person was probably 75 feet away at least.
 
Mezrein, after reading your post from this morning I'm thinking maybe you need to send your detector in. Obviously a gain setting of 30 with a thresh of -2 isn't going to get you very deep. But if you are getting barely one inch depth with those settings then there is a problem.
 
I've already got an email into them to ask this very question. Anyone know how long the turn around time is?
 
Just had my Omega 8000 in for a repair and from the time they received it until the time it left First Texas was 4 days.
 
Sucks that I have to send it in already. Makes me think I did something to it. Else, my luck really is as crappy as I thought it was...
 
First Texas is a little slow answering e-mails. I would call them and talk to Felix in service.
 
Ya I've noticed. They sent me a reply saying they were sending it to Daniel in support, that was 2 days ago.
 
Well, looks like I'll be sending it in for them to test and ensure there is nothing wrong with it. Was able to talk to both Felix and Daniel about it. Hopefully it'll be a quick turn around.
 
Keep us informed as to what they find out.
 
Should get there by Thursday. If I wanted it there by wednesday would have cost me 80 bucks, 20 for thursday, 80 for wednesday, what a difference a day makes eh?
 
Alright, so it got there Thursday at 11:50. I havent heard from them yet. How long should I wait tell I call them?
 
Ok, got my F5 back today. The note on it said the problem was the Threshold switch. They replaced it. This makes total sense to me since the chattering problem was occuring when I tried to increase sens. If the threshold switch wasnt changing the circuit level properally, of course its going to chatter. Anyone else care to comment? Please? :)
 
Good to hear they got you ready to go with a reasonable turn-around time.:thumbup:

Now you can see a great reason to have more than one detector - because cold turkey is hell.:laugh:
 
I thought they replaced the switch, the replaced the whole unit, lol. Ya, but in Oregon, its not so much a big deal because right now, rain is more the dominate force than sunshine is. lol
 
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